"Good question!" by S. Kibler
On the 28th I was given a greeting card and recipe as my two modes of communication. The greeting card was an emulation of the greeting card I received to alert me to the room change for that day. I used a piece of card stock because it seemed closest to the material that store bought cards are printed on and I also used a magenta marker and a teal marker to write the card because they are two of my favorite colors, so I guess that is part of who I am. I wasn’t sure how to approach the question, “Who are you?” Part of the problem was/is that I (and I suspect others as well) am not the same person in class as outside of class or at work. So, to answer the question I had to think about how much of myself I was willing to bare. I was a bit reserved with how much I wrote and took a somewhat humorous approach to it, which is often how I deal with things that make me uncomfortable. I wrote the card as a congratulation on being me and expressed my love for my family and friends and some of my interests, like reading and writing.

         My second mode of communication was the recipe card. I’m not entirely sure why, but I was a bit more open when expressing myself in this mode. It may have been that I had already bared part of myself or that this mode felt less “cheesy” to me. At any rate, I was a bit more candid on what I think makes me “me.” I repeated most of the stuff I put on the card, but also included some more information about myself, such as the fact that I can be compassionate and empathetic to a fault (if you tell me a sad story about yourself there’s a good chance I may cry at some point), that I can be extremely passionate and excited about life (the good and the bad), that I love music, making jewelry, and so on. I was a little more excited about the recipe mode and I found a recipe card that I used. I used my own pencil to write the information on the card and approached it like a recipe for making me. I guess I used pencil so that I wasn’t committed to keeping anything I wrote. If I felt that sharing something that I had written would make me uncomfortable, I could easily just erase and change it.

         Even though we had received the questions “Who are you?” and “Where are you going?” in the packet we were given, I hadn’t thought out the answers to the questions ahead of time and when they were posed to us in class I really wish I had. I definitely present many facets of myself in context to the many “roles” that I play in life. As we touched on briefly in the online session of class, I’m not the same “me” at school as I am at work or at home. While at work, I consider myself to be professional and serious (as serious as I can be, after all it is still me), while at home I’m really goofy and not at all serious. So when describing myself should I put who I am at school, work, or home? Ironically, my school self is somewhat limited because I live off campus and really don’t have too many friends or participate in too many school activities, I ended up describing myself when I’m at home with friends and family. I think that I feel a little bit more like “me” when I’m at home and that even when I’m at work and school, I can revert to who I am at home. By the end of class I still felt a little self-conscious, that maybe I had exposed too much of myself or that what I had written was actually kind of cheesy and lame.

         I found it interesting how everyone defines who they are differently. Some people defined themselves with activities or physical qualities, while others define themselves with more descriptions of their personality. I used a combination of both activities and personality descriptions, but left out all physical description. I’m not sure why I used activities and personality, but left out the physical descriptions. It could be that, even though I’m short and small, I don’t identify myself with being short and small. When my friends ask me what it’s like to be so short I usually tell them that I don’t consider myself short or tiny. My body is the same from situation to situation and I don’t know any different. It just is. I never really think of being short or having blue eyes as part of who I am, but I do know that other people often do. I think I stopped identifying who I am with what I look like after high school. Often during high school if we think (or are told) we’re pretty or ugly, short or tall we absorb that quality into our personality and who we are. Also, no one described themselves by their social or economic status, like “popular” or “middle class.” I wonder if this activity was done with younger and older age groups if we would have gotten answers with social and economic status as part of who they are.